George Lucas shot down at Crissy Field — but not out

The seven-member Presidio Trust board has rejected all three proposals for a cultural arts center across from Crissy Field — but plans to offer filmmaker George Lucas another site at the historic park in hopes of landing his $1 billion personal collection of Americana and “Star Wars’’ art.

The two rival plans will also get a shot at finding homes elsewhere in the 1,500-acre park.

Trust officials announced their long-anticipated decision Monday for transforming the 8-acre site across from Crissy Field, now occupied by the retail store Sport Basement.

Lucas’ team had a waged a vigorous lobbying campaign for the site, including backing from Gov. Jerry Brown, Mayor Ed Lee and both Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — as well as from scores of Silicon Valley executives and Hollywood types.

But Lucas’ original plan for a 60-foot-high Beaux Arts-style museum — and even a revised plan for a less ornate, 45-foot-high building — met strong resistance from those opposed to any development of the park site, as well as from backers of a competing plan by the popular Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

The conservancy had proposed building a sleek, glass-and-wood center devoted to the Presidio’s nature and history. A third competing proposal would have built a sustainability institute at the site.

“This is something that caught us completely by surprise,” David Perry, spokesman for Lucas, said of the latest offer for another site, at an undisclosed location closer to the Main Post.

“For four years, we have been told that the only site available for development is the Sports Basement site — and we have worked and reworked our plan to make it work,” Perry said. “Now, literally in the past few hours, we hear there is an alternative site.

“We are intrigued,” Perry said, but “a lot of other people have asked us to dance, and we will start calling them back.”

Perry apparently was referring, in particular, to an offer to Lucas to build his museum in Chicago, where the director’s new wife lives.

Perry ruled out one site that others have suggested, at the Palace of Fine Arts, saying the Lucas team had examined the property and concluded it wouldn’t work.